By Brian Carroll

In Berlin

THE  50-foot high mural opposite the Bellini Lounge on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin asks ‘How long is now?’

Below the mural, a man with a crucifix around his neck fends off the prostitutes, who assail him every few minutes. Pointing to his cross, he tells them gently that he is a man of God and Jesus loves them.

A flash-mob of tourists, students and young Berliners on a pub-crawl organised through Facebook, winds its way through the prostitutes and drug dealers, the street vendors and artists, into and out of subterranean bars, some of which stay open until 6am.

The customers who make it to AM-PM, the 24-hour bar at the end of Oranienburger Strasse, arrive on a continuum of drunkenness. They have no concept of time or now. As they straggle from the bar at dawn, each appears more strange and inebriated than the last, like watching a Darwinian progression in reverse.

Here in Berlin’s bohemian district, an island of bacchanalia in a country of regulation, time is both of no importance and of the essence. How long is now? For the German taxpayer, now is now. The moment of reckoning is here.

Next Wednesday, for the first time in two years, Angela Merkel will face sustained questioning about why German taxpayers - the only eurozone citizens not to blow their disposable incomes on credit card debt and property -  are being made to pay 25% of a E440bn bailout fund for debt-crippled States like Ireland, Greece, and Portugal. In a measure of how serious the parliament is taking this issue, the debate starts on Wednesday, September 7, and will continue intermittently until a vote is taken on September 29. Up to 23 members of Merkel’s governing coalition are threatening to vote against. Merkel could lose by 313 votes to 309. She needs the support of Opposition MPs to avoid her government falling. However, it’s a measure of the average German’s probity that experts think Merkel will definitely get that opposition support. There are enough solidly pro-European members in the opposition who will back the bailout, rather than pulling a political stroke for self-gain.

On the same day as Merkel faces the Bundestag, the German Supreme Court will deliver judgment on a constitutional challenge to the bailouts given to Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The Supreme Court is expected to demand a much bigger role for parliament before Merkel can dispense any more of the German taxpayer’s money to feckless EU citizens in the ‘peripheral states’. This week and month should therefore see major legal and political handcuffs being placed on Merkel, and a strong brake on her ability to press ahead, in tandem with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, with plans for a fiscal union in the EU – i.e. a United States of Europe.

Merkel’s handling of the euro crisis has seen her come under fire from the courts, parliament, media and the business community, and face embarrassing public criticism from her erstwhile mentor, the revered former German chancellor, Helmut Kohl.  Kohl says he doesn’t know what Germany stands for anymore and that Merkel ‘lacks compass.’  Germany’s first female prime minister - a 57-year-old voted three times by Forbes Magazine as the World’s Most Powerful Woman – is approaching Checkpoint Charlie in her political career.

A native Russian speaker, the first eastern European to rule Germany, a qualified quantum physicist married to a chemistry professor, the childless Merkel has often been depicted in the western press as Margaret Thatcher, only colder. Those who know her best say she is a woman of conviction, and Germany’s place in Europe, and Europe’s place in the world, are the twin towers of her political beliefs. Next Wednesday’s date with destiny would have been arduous enough, without the death of her father, Horst Kasner, a Protestant pastor, who died, aged 85, on Friday. Kasner moved his new-born daughter Angela from west to east Germany in 1954 to try and convert atheists there. Many believe Angela Merkel’s convictions on Europe are similarly evangelical.

Outside the Reichstag building - restored after reunification, to house the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament building -  families and tourists lie on the grass plaza and enjoy the early autumn sunshine. To the right of the Reichstag, the sunshine sets the glass Bundestag administration offices gleaming. Drivers in high powered black Mercedes drop serious looking suited men, aged in their 50s, outside, then speed away. It’s like a flash mob for grown-ups. It’s here that I meet Wolfgang Bosbach, an MP in Merkel’s party, spokesman on internal affairs, a high-powered partner in a law firm, and a man who is planning to vote against his party leader on September 29. I put it to him that political commentators have told me he and the 22 other coalition renegades are just posturing, and will not bring down the government over this.

Corinna Emundts, Berlin political correspondent for tagesschau.de, the on-line presence of the German tv station ARD, had told me: ‘It’s posturing, if the 23 all vote against it will force the coalition into its last crisis. They are not going to do it, when it comes down to it, they will save themselves.”

Bosbach releases a short Teutonic smile, before his deeply tanned face turns stern, and he showers me with a machine-gun burst of German denials that translate as:

“I wasn’t drunk when I decided this; I read everything and I believe in my opinion. I stand fully behind my decision to vote against. You have to continually reassess your opinion because first of all it was just Greece [being bailed out] and was supposed to be a one-off, but now it’s a permanent plan and there has to be someone who says ‘stop, we’re going too fast.’

‘There are colleagues who are of the same opinion, but say they will stand behind the chancellor and show loyalty. But my loyalty is to my country and it’s a question of my conscience now. I don’t believe that it should be future generations of Germans who have to bear the brunt of this. It’s the sheer volume of this. We are not talking about a couple of billion euros, it’s more than €200 billion.

“I have serious concerns. When we went into the euro it was supposed to be about stability and not a transfer union for money between states. Now we are making huge steps and before that happens we need to be very careful. There have to be clear rules for countries when they are hopelessly in debt, for how to deal with them. The high interest rates can’t simply go to the banks and it can’t be the German taxpayer who is having to come up with the funds. There are three different parties involved – the State, the banks and the people – and this is supposed to be a safety net, but it can’t be if it’s the German taxpayer who ends up carrying all the costs.”

Of every euro the Irish State receives in ‘bail-out’ loans, 25c comes from Herr and Frau taxpayer.

Does he think the Irish and Greeks should leave the euro?

“No. Ireland has big problems and I support the fact that it’s a problem that we can solve together. The stronger countries should be supporting the weaker ones but I don’t support the fact that credit should continually be given. I don’t doubt the fact that Ireland is going to be able to master its problems. I stand by the rules that were there when the euro was introduced. The criteria of the stability pact should be followed. If countries are continually unable to fulfill the criteria over a period longer than two to three years, then there should be some kind of rule where that country should leave the euro. At the moment that could only potentially apply to Greece.”

I ask Herr Bosbach about the approximately 500 Mercedes and BMWS which have been burned out in attacks in Berlin, since the London riots last month. Does this point to growing youth disaffection in Germany? His response is insightful.

“First it was the S-class Mercedes, the most expensive car. When they were burned out, a lot of people thought, good on them, they are the rich. Then it was a C-class Mercedes, and people thought hold on we have a problem here. Then it was the A-class, and now it’s on the front page of the papers and politicians need to do something about this. I don’t think it will escalate because I don’t believe society has the same tendency towards violence as seen in London. Here these people would get between one year and 15 years in prison.”

Whether the car burnings are a portent of taxpayer dissatisfaction over Germans potentially paying €200 billion for less responsible EU citizens in Club Med or Ireland, remains to be seen. However, the problem is big enough for the Berlin police to ask for extra Federal police officers to come and help with their investigations. Public sector funding cuts in Berlin have seen the city lose 4,000 police officers in the past ten years. The Berlin municipal election campaign was underway this week, against the backdrop of declining public revenues, and a city increasingly reliant on other parts of Germany – in particular Munich’s taxpayers – to bail it out. This is how a transfer union works – the strong help the weak. Merkel and Sarkozy are leading European citizens towards such a union; but at a significant price.

If Merkel gets the bailout package through parliament on September 29, she and Sarkozy will then seek to bring the rest of the eurozone states further along the line towards a fiscal union, where strict regulations would restrict each state’s ability to set taxes and expenditure. Merkel and Sarkozy are already using the eurozone crisis to press their agenda. So, for example, this week we saw Spanish lawmakers approve a constitutional amendment to write a debt ceiling into the constitution. This move was dictated by Merkel and Sarkozy. The Spanish parliament will from 2020 be restricted in its ability to set tax rates and expenditure. It can only do so within the terms of borrowing limits set by a Franco-German led EU. Similar constitutional changes are planned in Italy and France. All 17 eurozone countries are expected to pass similar reforms by mid 2012 – a precondition set by Merkel and Sarkozy before they committed to recent changes in the bailout packages for Ireland, Greece, and Portugal. With the Italian and Spanish economies endangered, the German taxpayer could soon be asked for more euros, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. German retail sales rose slightly in July but were stagnant in August. Consumer confidence is low in a society where a zeitung schlepper (burger flipper) earns €7 an hour, a call centre worker €13, and the average worker in industry and services earns about €3,700 a month. Across the Atlantic, gold prices plunged to their lowest values since 2008 and the US government revealed zero job growth in August, the first time reporting no month-over-month change in employment since February 1945. China holds trillions in I.O.Us from America. The world, western economies in particular, is in crisis. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers but the bailout package which Merkel and Sarkozy want to use as a European version of the IMF amounts to €440bn – three times the current EU budget. According to Merkel, the only path out of the forest fire of eurozone debt is further political and economic integration. If she can get the €440bn bailout fund through the Bundestag, it will be used as a slush-fund to help troubled states out of their debt and liquidity problems – but at a political price.

Her finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, told party colleagues this week that he thinks a new European treaty handing far-reaching finance and fiscal powers to EU institutions is required. We’ve already had the bitter and acrimonious Lisbon 1 and 11 debates in Ireland. Prepare for Lisbon 111 because it’s coming as surely as a German train.

Even with all these continental battles brewing, Merkel found time to pass some domestic measures this week – new automated machines to increase the tax-take from prostitution, which is legal in Germany. Back on the Oranienburger Strasse, where most of Berlin’s prostitutes ply their trade, there’s a protest outside the Tacheles, a graffiti-covered commune which serves as an arts centre. The Tacheles used to be a Nazi police station during the war when Oranienburger, a predominantly Jewish area for 100 years, was cleared of its Jews. After the war,  Berlin’s liberals took it over and changed the name to Tacheles – which is Yiddish for ‘straight-talking’. The artists in Tacheles are currently facing an eviction order from the Berlin authorities, keen to get some rental income from the building. At home, the Germans are squeezing the people for every euro they can get - the money needed for a 21st Century European expansion.